Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Cocas (Catalonian Flatbread)

Most
of my photography depends upon natural light. Yeah, I know that to some extent that's true
for everybody -- it's hard to capture sun-dappled beauty without it. But
the window is a little narrower for me. My house is particularly dark,
as is my city of Portland. Every now and then I flirt with purchasing
some sort of light setup to extend my photograph-able hours, but
laziness and thrift have kept me from it. For the most part, I time
my wintertime cooking around the last of the natural light, or nudge the
leftovers back into a semblance of deliciousness the next time the sun
rises. But that all falls to pieces when it comes to drinks.

See,
it's hard for me to mix up a cocktail without drinking it. And it's
hard for me to drink a cocktail during daylight hours, since they end around 4:45 pm these days (well, to be fair, it's actually kind of
easy for me to drink a cocktail then -- it just tends to wreak havoc on
the rest of my day). For the record, I have been drinking, and fairly
deliciously at that (there's a gin-pomegranate-mint cocktail that I
promise I'll photograph and post one of these days). But since the drink
photography is lagging behind, I'll leave you with pictures of the next
best thing: drinking snacks.

I make no secret of my fondness for cocktail party nibbles, nor of my
position that they make a perfectly respectable (and awesome) dinner choice. And my
current favorite in this genre is the coca. Cocas are Catalonia's answer
to pizza, a flatbread (usually cheese-free) topped with all manner of
Iberian delicacies. I pulled together a few of the most delicious
examples for a recent story -- you can find recipes and a bit of
backstory over at NPR's Kitchen Window. They're great, whether or not
you've got a glass of vino in hand. Salud!